


Snow and Dust

by parisian_girl



Category: His Dark Materials (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28575546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parisian_girl/pseuds/parisian_girl
Summary: "She wants to go back to Mary Malone’s office. She wants to read the books, all of them, cheap and nasty though the covers looked. She wants to experiment with the machine on the desk and discover what it does. She wants to reassure herself, suddenly, that her self-righteous anger is well-placed; she wants to prove, if only to herself, that she really is as clever as another female scholar. She hates herself for it.More than anything, she wants to soak up the one place where she knows Lyra has been."Marisa returns to Mary's office in the middle of the night. She doesn't expect Mary to still be there.
Relationships: Marisa Coulter & Mary Malone
Comments: 7
Kudos: 38





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first foray into writing HDM - with a hefty caveat that it's years since I read the books and I'm only just caught up with the TV series. But Marisa's character fascinates me, and while this doesn't venture into Maryisa (which was so, sooo tempting!) I love the idea of exploring the two of them together, figuring out a little about each other's worlds. 
> 
> Set - obviously - after s2e5, but assumes that Lyra doesn't return to Boreal's house that night.

Marisa Coulter has been dreaming about snow.

She loves snow. Not the miserable flakes that sometimes fall in Oxford, coating the roads and pavements with nothing more than a wet slush, but real snow, the snow of the North. Miles upon miles of it. Unbroken. Unflinching. That’s the snow she has been dreaming about, and in her dream she was hesitating, unwilling to break it, to tame this magnificent white wilderness with her footprints, even though what she loves more than snow itself is walking in it. The unexpected softness of it always softens her body. The stillness of it stills her mind. The coldness of it numbs her senses until only the fundamentals of existence are left. She craves this absolution, this release. But in her dream there is a reason why she shouldn’t walk. Her foot is poised, an out-of-place stiletto heel hovering over an unknown threshold. Just as she tries to force it down onto the snow, she wakes in a cold sweat, shivering.

It isn’t her bed or her bedroom, and Carlo’s ostentatious satin bedsheets suddenly feel as horribly slippery as his snake. She kicks them off her body, hard. Her dæmon, perched on the end of the bed with one paw poised over the edge as if to jump, leaps before he is sent flying. Outside, the breeze of an unfamiliar Oxford rustles the trees. She breathes with it. For a mad moment, she wonders if her heart will start to beat differently, if she’s been in this new world long enough for her body to start melting into it, but all it does is slow, gradually, each beat still hard in her chest. She can’t stay here. She needs some air.

The suit is where she left it, tossed carelessly over the back of the chair. She picks the blouse up and lets it run, rippling, through her fingers. Pure silk. Only the best from Carlo, and on this she has to admit his taste has been impeccable. After the hours of wearing it next to her skin, it carries her perfume, but there is something else too. Another scent, strange but intoxicating. Something dangerous.

Then monkey chitters nervously from the windowsill as she slips the blouse on and hunts for the trousers. He thinks she shouldn’t be going, but a glance is enough to quiet him. She slips the jacket on against the slight chill of the darkness, picks up the heels. He moans softly and covers his mouth with his paw. He thinks she should go back to bed, but if she stays in here much longer she’ll suffocate. _Freedom_. That’s what the blouse smells of. The unfettered, unbound freedom of being a world where it doesn’t seem like she has to apologise for who she is, and where she can walk the streets at 2am without needing to give an explanation. This room - this house - has too many threads linking it to her world. Too many restraints that, tonight, she doesn’t want to feel. Heels in hand so as not to wake Carlo, she steps softly down the stairs and out into the night. Her monkey’s face presses against the bedroom window, watching her go. She doesn’t look back to see his anguished eyes.

Her heels tap quietly on the pavement. It’s a rhythmic accompaniment to her thoughts, which are becoming increasingly angry and frustrated as she realises that what she is feeling is betrayal. All these years this world has existed in parallel with her own. Others have known of it, and yet no one has ever told her. Goaded by the light beat of her shoes on the asphalt, she wonders why. Did they not think enough of her and her work? Clearly not. Was it because she’s a woman, and therefore full of sin and not to be trusted? Obviously. Were they scared of what she might do with this world, what she might discover, what she might bring back with her? Absolutely.

With each step she sees it more and more clearly; how different things could have been had she been born here. Normally she doesn’t dwell on what-might-have-beens, or tries not to, but this is like poison, spreading tentacles in her mind. She could, she thinks, have received the doctorate she deserves. She could have taken the credit she deserves, for all those papers that were lauded without her name where it should have been. She could have had the status, the respect - damn it, she deserves those more than anything. Tears form hot in her eyes as she realises how much she could have had, how much she hasn’t had, how much she wants it. All of it.

Could her mother have loved her in this world, she wonders? Could Asriel?

Could Lyra?

It’s the one thing she knows she doesn’t deserve, but maybe here she could have had it anyway. Her hand instinctively reaches down. She wants the fur of her dæmon to grip, to tether her to reality, but the monkey isn’t there. With a jolt, she realises that in this world he never would have been.

She doesn’t know where she’s going. This Oxford isn’t so different to her Oxford, but unshed tears are blinding her and she simply keeps walking to keep the rhythm going. She isn’t ready to let it go just yet. It moves her mind around in circles, backwards and forwards. Lyra. Carlo. Lyra. The Magisterium, idiots who thought she was a little woman under their control. Lyra. The scholar. _The scholar_. Everything Marisa wants to be and can’t.

It isn’t Mary Malone’s fault. She remembers the bristle of anger that ran over her skin when Carlo called the woman _arrogant_ , as if that was the only suitable word for a woman who thinks and speaks and acts for herself. Marisa has always thought that she, too, is a woman like that. But Mary Malone, a female scholar full of the kind of unrehearsed, unplanned, casual confidence that Marisa can only dream about, has made her realise how wrong she’s been. And, nestled in among the hurt and fury and resentment that has been seething in her stomach ever since, is a growing spasm of hunger for all the knowledge that she senses is here, in this world. Knowledge that Mary Malone has at her fingertips.

Her feet are aching now. It feels like she’s walked for miles in heels that were never designed to walk anywhere, and she stops, blinking furiously at the last of the tears. Without realising, she’s walked right into the heart of the university. Empty of scholars - students, she reminds herself, and lecturers, that’s what they’re called in this world - the place seems eerie. It hums and throbs faintly with something that she can’t define, an energy that she can’t quite place. It disturbs her that she’s followed an unconscious path all the way to St Peter’s, and now the rhythm of her steps is hesitant. She wants to go back to Mary Malone’s office. She wants to read the books, all of them, cheap and nasty though the covers looked. She wants to experiment with the machine on the desk and discover what it does. She wants to reassure herself, suddenly, that her self-righteous anger is well-placed; she wants to prove, if only to herself, that she really is as clever as another female scholar. She hates herself for it.

More than anything, she wants to soak up the one place where she knows Lyra has been.

It’s easy to get in. The outside door to the building isn’t secured, and she remembers the right corridor, the turn she has to make, the mountain print on the door. She expects this one to be locked, but she can deal with that. Only when her fingers are poised on the handle does she notice the strip of light shining underneath and onto her shoes.

***

Mary Malone has been dreaming about snow.

It’s in her office, this snow, thick and white and swirling all around her. She can’t see. She knows that her computer will be frozen, that all her books will be ruined, and yet still there’s something that she has to do here. She doesn’t know why she isn’t cold. She doesn’t know why the snowflakes aren’t sticking to her unruly curls, like they do on the rare occasions it snows in Oxford and she takes her niece and nephew sledding. She peers into this strange blizzard, trying to spot anything that might help her, but the only thing she can see that isn’t covered in white is the I-Ching box on her desk. She knows this isn’t right. She never leaves it out on her desk. But in her dream it’s there, beyond her reach; the snow is too heavy for her to move. Just as she stretches, less than two inches separating her from the box she suddenly feels is vital, she wakes, her head jerking up from her arms and her breath coming in gasps.

She’s sitting at her desk. There is no snow. Of course there’s no snow. And when she checks, with frantically scrabbling hands, the I-Ching box is in her drawer like it always is.

She rubs her face and runs her fingers through her hair, willing her mind back into some kind of reality. A god-almighty crick is starting in her neck. No wonder; a glance at the clock tells her it’s two thirty, so she must have been sleeping for at least two hours. She stayed here because she hadn’t wanted to go home, because her mind had been whirling too fast after the woman calling herself Lyra’s mother had left, because she had wanted to sit in peace and quiet and try to make some sense of the whole damn thing. She’d failed miserably.

Coffee. She needs coffee, and she needs some fresh air.

She doesn’t know who screams first when she opens her office door, her or the woman who almost falls through it from the other side. Her first thought is burglar, and the only weapon she has on her is a dirty coffee cup. Her second thought, given the odd events of the previous days, is that the police have put her under some kind of surveillance, and god help that little rat Waters if that’s the case. But then her eyes focus, adjusting themselves to the relative darkness of the corridor. She recognises the perfume that had earlier made her think, somewhat strangely, of amber encased in ice, and she recognises the blue eyes that are staring at her in shock. Glacial blue. The blue of voyages north and faraway snow. She shakes her head. She must still be half-dreaming.

‘Mrs Coulter?’

The woman blinks. In less than a couple of seconds there is a passable smile on her face and her posture is upright, steely, as if she has every right to be there and there’s nothing unusual in the circumstances or timing at all, but Mary has already seen something. A nervousness, blinked away like an annoying eyelash. Did she imagine it? She doesn’t think so, but it confuses her even more.

‘Dr Malone. I apologise for disturbing you.’

‘I…’ Mary shook her head, trying to clear it before looking back at Mrs Coulter - Marisa - if, she thinks, that’s even her real name. Her form seems to materialise from the shadows; the same perfectly tailored suit and blouse, the same impossible heels, the same scraped-back hair. This time, though - and Mary is sure she isn’t imagining it - there is a hesitancy behind the poise.She might even have called it a vulnerability, something in the way Marisa is holding herself that makes her look a little like a child.

‘I was going to make coffee.’ It sounds bizarre, even to her fuddled ears, but she can’t think of what else to say or which other question to ask first. ’Would you like one?’

There’s a silence of a few seconds in which Mary is sure she can hear her own heart beating, before Marisa nods, slowly.

‘You aren’t going to skip out on me this time?’ She tosses the question over her shoulder as she walks back to her desk to collect the second dirty mug, but she would swear that, even in the darkness, she can see Marisa blush. It’s something that she can already sense doesn’t happen very often.

‘I’m sorry.’ Marisa’s voice is stiff. ‘Something…came up.’

‘I’ll take that as a no.’ Mary waves her inside. She shouldn’t leave Marisa alone in here. She shouldn’t trust her, but she needs a few minutes to herself. She cannot deal with this - whatever it is - while she’s still half-asleep. ‘Make yourself at home.’

She leaves the door open. The small kitchen area where she can wash the mugs is at the other end of the corridor, and when she looks back she sees Marisa standing, looking transfixed at the bookshelf, looking as if she’s about to cry.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the love and comments! This second / final chapter is a bit lighter, & was a lot of fun to write :). Hope you enjoy!

When Mary returns to her office, she finds Marisa sitting, not on the one chair that was free of papers and books - her own, the one that she had been fast asleep in just a little while before - but on the floor, her back against the bookcase and her knees drawn up. She’s reading, deeply absorbed already in a thick book that Mary guesses has been plucked from the shelf at random. _Dark Energy: Theory and Observations_. She doesn’t look up as Mary steps over her feet to get to the kettle and cafetière, both of which are just as grubby as the mugs were. There’s no response when Mary asks her how she takes her coffee and so she guesses at black, one sugar, and sets the mug down on the corner of the desk.

‘You can use the chair, you know.’ She lifts an armful of folders from another chair, one that isn’t hers, and looks around for somewhere to deposit them. ‘I really should tidy up in here, but then I’m worried I’ll forget where I’ve put something and I’ll never find it again.’

Marisa doesn’t reply.

Mary sighs, and takes a long mouthful of coffee. She should be irritated. She should be demanding answers. But there are so many questions still swirling in her head - not least of which is what Marisa is doing here, on her floor uninvited at three o’clock in the morning - but how to put that politely? _Nonsense_ , she tells herself sternly, _you can put it how you damn well please_ , but for some reason she doesn’t want Marisa disappearing into the night. Neither does she want a confrontation, and so she simply sips and watches. Marisa is completely engrossed. Her brow furrows a little, then clears, then furrows again, the pages turning slowly under her fingers. Mary finishes her first coffee and makes herself a second. Marisa’s is left, untouched, growing cold and sludgy in the ‘Best Professor’ mug.

‘So.’ Mary clears her throat. If she doesn’t, they’ll both still be here when her first students arrive in six hours’ time, but she still doesn’t know what to say. The sound hangs in the air between them like smoke.

‘Fascinating.’ Marisa finally looks up, her expression slightly unfocused. ‘Did a woman really write this?’

Mary laughs. She can’t help it, but her laughter dies in her throat as she sees that Marisa is serious. ‘Of course’. Her brow wrinkles. ‘Why ever not?’

Marisa is silent for a moment. One finger taps on the edge of the book, slowly, deliberately, as if each tap is the weighing of a decision. She wears dark nail polish, Mary notices. Perfect, without a single chip.

‘Where I come from, Dr Malone…’

‘Please, call me Mary.’

Marisa ignores her. ‘…Women are not permitted to have their names on books.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Mary splutters into her cup. The sudden reminder that Marisa is from other world - that there are other worlds out there that she has no idea about - catches her unawares, but more than that, she isn’t entirely sure that Marisa can mean what she thinks she means. ‘Women aren’t allowed to write books?’

‘Oh, they’re allowed to write them.’ Marisa gets to her feet in one swift motion, stretching to put the book back where it came from on the shelf. For some strange reason, the fluid movement reminds Mary of a monkey. ‘Just not to publish them.’

She looks at Mary. Her eyes are defiant, but also wary. She looks, Mary thinks, as if she’s wondering how much to say, or whether what she’s said is already too much. But as far as she, Mary, is concerned, it could never be enough. She wants to know everything.

‘I tried googling you’, she blurts out. ‘You said you’re an experimental theologian but I couldn’t find anything about you, or anything you’d written. Is that why?’

But Marisa just looks confused. ‘You did _what_ to me?’

‘Well…’ Mary is nonplussed. ‘Googled, you know….oh.’ Her eyes widen as she realises, and mentally kicks herself for being so stupid. ’You don’t know. Of course. You don’t have computers in your world.’

‘If, by computer, you mean that thing…’ Marisa points at the machine on Mary’s desk, ‘then no. We don’t.’

‘But your name is Marisa Coulter?’

‘Yes’. Marisa looks thoroughly bewildered, now, and a little irritated. ‘I told you that. What is _googled_?’

‘So Icouldn’t find you, because in this world you don’t exist.’ Mary feels as if her brain is lagging one coffee behind the rest of her and is scrambling to catch up. ‘Of course…’

‘I can assure you I _do_ exist.’ Marisa reaches over and taps Mary sharply on the arm, jolting her out of her rapid train of thought. ‘And I very much want to know what it is you do with that thing.’

‘Oh… of course.’ Mary clears her throat again, trying to switch into teacher mode. It isn’t successful. ‘I’ve never had to explain a computer before, can you believe. Stupid for a physicist. Well, it’s a machine that…you can type on it. It creates documents. You can search the internet, which is kind of like an international encyclopaedia…’ She breaks off. She’s doing a terrible job but Marisa, although Mary guesses she’s doing her best to hide it, is looking desperate. Hungry. Mary smiles. ‘Why don’t I just show you?’

***

Marisa has never known anything like it.

She grabs whatever Mary tells her with both hands, trying it out, twisting it, attempting to take it to its limits. The internet, email, _googling_ (she’s secretly relieved to find that it’s not some kind of old Gyptian spell or curse to unravel the truth), and then, perhaps sensing that Marisa wants more, Mary shows her more. There are ways of instantly translating words from one language to another. There are the specialist programmes that Mary uses to measure light, measure sound, to search for specific academic papers, to perform in moments the kind of complex calculations that would have taken hours by hand. She asks questions one after the other, about the computer and Mary’s work and the research she’s published and dark matter and whether dark matter is the same as Dust, and for the first time in a very long time she doesn’t worry about seeming incompetent. She’s never come across anything like it. What she could do with this is her world…she tries not to think about it, not yet. Her anger is channeled and she wants to keep it that way.

Mary is surprised, she can tell. Surprised that she’s so interested, and surprised that she understands.

‘I think you should be studying computer science or something, not experimental theology.’

‘Are the two not connected?’ She can certainly see the connection. Mary has explained to her all about chips and electrons, but she isn't quite convinced. It doesn't seem enough. What kind of being, she wonders, must be in this machine for it to work as it does, to know all that it does? Is it Dust? The Authority would certainly see this as heresy. The thought sends a little shiver of pleasure down her spine, and she reaches down for her monkey to suppress it, to grab his fur until the sensation passes, but her hands hits Mary’s leg instead and she snatches it back.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ A look of puzzlement sweeps across Mary’s eyes, but she doesn’t ask and Marisa is grateful. ‘I’m always getting myself in the way. Would you like another coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I think I’ve shown you everything I can’.

‘Hmm.’ Marisa hits a few keys, watching the name of the author of the Dark Energy book appear in the search bar, watching the results of her actions shimmer down the page in blue and black. She’s quite sure that Mary _hasn’t_ shown her everything, but she’ll let it pass.

‘So now it’s my turn.’

Marisa tries not to let her frustration show, and slowly makes to get up from her chair. Mary has this in front of her all the time. Why does she want to use it now?

‘I don’t mean on the computer.’ Mary laughs. ‘I mean it’s my turn to ask questions.’

‘I haven’t asked any.’

‘You’ve done nothing but ask questions for the past hour,’ Mary points out, and Marisa can feel herself flush crimson. ‘No, don’t worry at all, it’s lovely to have someone so interested - but I’m intrigued, that’s all. You’re obviously a very intelligent woman. You read a book on dark matter there and understood it - at least, I assume you understood it - and yet I’ve just been showing you how to use the internet.’

‘That’s hardly…’

‘I know, in your world you don’t have it, but it’s fair enough for me to be interested in your world, don’t you think?’

Marisa sighs. She really doesn’t want to talk about her world.

‘Ok, but at least answer me this.’ Mary fixes her with a stare that she can’t escape, and she squirms a little. The feeling is as unexpected as it is unwelcome. ‘Why did you come here? Tonight, I mean?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want you to be sorry. I’m certainly not, I’m enjoying myself.’ The smile is gentle. Marisa searches it for any sign that Mary is making fun, or being sarcastic, or lying, but she can find none. Instead, the smile warms her. ‘I just…oh, never mind.’ Mary shrugs and turns to pick up her coffee, and Marisa doesn’t know what makes her do it but she reaches out and touches Mary’s arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says again. She doesn’t think she’s ever apologised so much in her life, and she isn’t sure she likes it. ‘I don’t know why I came. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘But you didn’t know I’d be here.’

‘No.’

‘Were you planning on breaking in?’ Mary says it as a joke, but Marisa hesitates just a second too long and she raises her eyebrows. ‘Don’t answer that.’

‘You study Dust. So do I. We call it different things, but I wanted to find out more.’

‘And you couldn’t sleep.’

‘And I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Neither could I.’ Mary laughs, a little self-deprecatingly. ‘Well, at least I couldn’t until I fell asleep right there. Weirdest dreams, too, a snow blizzard all over the computer and books. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about that. Next time, just come during the day, okay? Come whenever you like. I’d love to read some of what you’ve written.’

Marisa stiffens. ‘I told you women aren’t allowed…’

‘But I’m sure you’ve found a way around it.’ Mary’s conspiratorial smile is infectious and, despite her unwillingness, Marisa finds herself returning it.

‘I have.’ She looks at the clock. ‘But I should go.’

‘Oh, of course, you should get back to Lyra.’

The twist in Marisa’s gut is enough to make her feel sick, but Mary doesn’t notice and carries on talking.

‘Take a book or two, if you want. I mean, I’m sure you have lots of good books in your own world, but if you’re interested in how we research dark matter - Dust - here, then you’re welcome…’

Marisa, in an attempt to calm her heart that is still racing from the mention of _getting back_ to Lyra - because of course Mary thinks that, she thinks she’s left Lyra at home, sleeping peacefully, that Lyra lives with her like any normal daughter - reaches out to the shelves without a word, her instinct to suck up as much knowledge as she can running headlong into this sudden…what is this feeling?

Grief? Regret?

‘Maybe not that one…I’m guessing that wouldn’t go down too well in your world.’

Marisa looks at the book in her hands. _How to Build a Nuclear Bomb: And Other Weapons of Mass Destruction._ ‘What’s a…’

‘Never mind. It's tongue-in-cheek anyway.’ Mary shakes her head. ‘How about this one instead?’

She allows Mary to select some books and research papers for her - all, she notes, written by women. They’re pressed into her arms by warm hands and another one of those smiles, and she realises that she doesn’t want to leave. She doesn’t want to return to a world in which she is nothing. She doesn’t want to have to fight anymore.

But she has to fight. It’s what she does.

‘I’ll see you again?’

Marisa nods her head towards the pile she’s carrying. ‘I should return the books.’

‘They’re yours.’ Mary nods decisively; her tone brokers no argument. ‘I meant…well. I meant to talk more. I’ve never met anyone like you. Another woman who knows what I’m talking about. Not another man who explains everything to me like I’ve five.’

Is it Marisa’s imagination, or is Mary blushing? But it startles her, this veiled admission, and she finds she wants to say yes. She wants to know what Mary means. She wants to know everything.

_Lyra._ It’s the monkey’s voice, faint but distinct. She growls at it in her mind but she knows it’s right. Behind the voice, though, there’s something else. A vision, but not quite a vision. A sensation of somewhere warm, of deserts and canyons and sunlight, and of Dust falling around her and Mary like snow. _Mary’s dream._ Her dream. It should horrify her, this vision of sin, so much of it, but for some reason…

She blinks. Enough. Suddenly, she’s exhausted.

‘Yes.’ She steps through the door, and looks back with a small, genuine smile. ’But maybe not in this world.’


End file.
